Grab some glass preserving jars (mason jars) and use them to raise your speaker cables off the floor so that there’s no contact whatsoever. Glass is a good insulator, then you get air before more glass.
If you can hear a difference then elevators are for you. You might just use those jars, or invest in something purpose built.
Don’t believe everything you read, as there are measurement people out there who do really basic things but don’t dig deeper. Then there are those who do really basic things and get obvious differences, but don’t dig deeper.
Try the mason jars or similar. Really.
Cheers
Mick
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Kimber 12tc
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I f you own a DS and haven’t made this very simple mod, I highly suggest it. The only downside is if you are a Bridge II user, you will lose that functionality.
https://forum.psaudio.com/t/signup-list-for-directstream-dac-external-power-controller-boards/29520
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The last show i saw before the lockdown was Marc Cohn. He still has it.
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The last show I saw before lockdown was Wire. One of my absolute favorite artists. Only had to kill two chat sessions with extremely menacing behavior. When you are big like me you get away with it. Great show as a last…
I should explain. One reason why I don’t chance live shows anymore is that way too many people go the shows to chat with their friends about their favorite color or their new bowling ball. If they are near me I make certain they know how I feel. I don’t go to many shows anymore as it seems like the place to go to talk about whatever. Bah.
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The last two I saw were Chick Corea and Branford Marsalis. Both shows were so good. I couldn’t have asked for better shows before isolation began. It was also one of Corea’s last shows before he passed.
As far as chatty concert neighbors go, I usually find Jazz shows to be much more polite then other genre’s. With the exception of Jazz clubs, where you should expect quite chatter.
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So another story about addition through subtraction…or moving crap around. I removed two subs a couple of weeks ago. Last night I had @aangen over to help me move the rack from between the speakers to the side of the speakers. It was a 4 hour process but worth it. The soundstage is a lot better and even more realistic. I remember reading in Jim Smiths “Get Better Sound” that he said removing the rack between the speakers is one of the biggest upgrades you can do with your system. I still have some more work to do and some things to test out.
Sorry for all the pictures…just thought it would give you a better idea of the before and after. Also @aangen thinks I need to decorate between the amps. I was thinking of an Ikea Kallax 3 x 1 Rack for records storage near the floor. He thought some sort of mood altering light show device. I dont think the golfing statue will remain…but I like it when pigs fly.
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I thought you were wrong in moving your absolutely gorgeous rack from between the speakers. I love looking at it when I listen. But it took almost three seconds to hear the improvement. It was not subtle.
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I would love to have a chance to separate the HF noise effect of the gear from its acoustic/soundwave effect to hear the difference.
Good if long enough speaker cables are already available and don’t have to be exchanged.
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Roger that. I was reluctant for years to try the gear stack from out from between the speakers, but, as you say, the change was obvious. The tricky part is getting the cable lengths to cooperate and not cost you more in the process.
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The 9m Stealth cables Matt bought are relatively cheap at around $25k list price. The Sakra V17 LE version I would prefer list for just south of $150k. I am so far resistant to the idea.
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Yikes, I get the reticence. I only got set back a pair of 12ft. OCC XLR’s and Bob Howard gave me a deal on a used set.
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My Audio drug dealer has the.general opinion that if you have a limited budget you are better off allocating dollars towards higher level interconnects between the sources and then use a lesser cable between the preamp and amplifier (s). My 9 Meters of Stealth Metacarbon XLRs cost about the same as 1 meter of Stealth V17 LE XLRs. @aangen thinks that is a relative “bargain”.
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Who am I to contradict your audio drug dealer, but how the hell does that make sense?
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The following may be rightfully viewed as clueless commentary…Guessing possibly that the level of signal before the preamp is not as high (more delicate) and therefore more susceptible to cable influences than the signal post preamp. Or maybe since I have matching MBL reference 6010 preamp to the MBL 9011 amps that there is less of a need…or maybe getting rid of crap between the speakers is that much better than an cable upgrade… @rower30 may have some commentary on the why’s or he may completely disagree.
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People overthink this.
If I have two panes of glass stacked one on the other, one perfect and one cloudy. The first pane needs to be the best one so downstream improvement can be seen in this example. It can’t ever be better than the first pane of glass.
I suggest people consider the IC cables to make them most “perfectly clear” and then work on the speaker cables. I work from inside to outside. Keep what your electronics can do all the way out to the amplifier. Analog gets worse and worse as we go, so keep it as good as you can as long as you can in the chain. Don’t stick an icky pane of glass in the middle of the chain.
As far as sensitivity to good or bad design between IC and speaker cable, that’s a thousand-year debate. My take on it? IC cable see a FIXED and CONSTANT high impedance load so they have a HUGELY easier time of it than a speaker cable that has to work with an amplifier and speaker’s terribly inconsistent impedance. This makes high quality IC cables easier to build to a high standard than a speaker cable. We also have 20+ amps in a speaker cable that can, and does, cause reactance reflections off the speaker load (ZOBEL networks). This is not nearly as attenuated as an IC cable’s much smaller reflections, and in theory and IC cable as no current into infinity load. It is an ideal VOLTAGE potential transfer. The reactance can distort the signal, but reflections are largely not there. Speaker cables has BOTH reactance distortions and reflections, both.
Speaker cable has to try to match the speaker’s impedance and also to make the amplifier happy, too. Each end requires something different. The amp wants no reactance at all, but we need to manage reactance to adjust the cable impedance. Amps are tested into static eight-ohm loads as a reference and that’s hardly how we use them.
What do I do? I use the absolute best IC cable I can afford. THEN I consider the budget and speaker cable. ICONOCLAST makes the speaker cable easier as we use the exact same design with all copper. IC cable are also the same EM design across all coppers. My ethos is the design should be as good for every price point of copper. There may be a copper pecking order, but they are all very good cables to begin with. The idea was to bring really good cables at a far better entry price point. A full TPC loom is really good at sonics and price for what you get in the design.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Galen
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Another Master Class brought to us by Galen.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate your insight.
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I picked up a Naim Mu-so 2nd generation for my living room. I really like it. The new version is Roon ready so it was pretty much plug and play.
Vince and I had a learning experience this week. He had some Audio files he wanted to share with me so he used Google file sharing. When I copied the files from Google to my Windows box I tried to update the tags and when I did all the tags were removed. I clicked on a file and hit properties and saw a message that said these files came from a different computer so they may be blocked. It had a checkbox to unblock them. I did unblock them but had mixed results tagging them after doing this.
I asked him to share the files via Dropbox and those files were unmolested. No warning about this file came from another computer and may be blocked. No issues tagging or editing the files. So it seems to me that when Google is used to transport audio files it does something to the files. If I didn’t try to update the tags I might have missed it. But I am a stickler when it comes to tagging.
It was an interesting lesson. It is repeatable.
Oh, to stay on topic not using Google file sharing seems to be an upgrade.
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A very helpful bit of information. Thanks for letting us know.
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